This blog started out as a way to keep in touch with some of my former students,but has morphed into the wild and varied ramblings of a former wrestling/track coach/history teacher. Nowadays I'm a counselor to the oppressed and lost (aka as teen-agers) and share a nice home with some dogs, cats, a vegetarian teen moralist, a precocious pre-teen animal whisperer, and an intelligent, beautiful harried spouse who tries to impose order on the chaos, along with a few good books...

Sunday, July 29, 2012

Not a bad first few days of work, though there's a lot to do (as usual) before teachers and students arrive in the next few days. I fully expect to be bombarded with parent requests for assistance and information starting this upcoming week, so I'm mentally trying to approach things in such a way as to be able to do that efficiently while still getting the prep work done for two school programs (I had a full time job with one school last year, now I've been given a second school to take care of, oh, well - life is always interesting for those of us in education).

Finished Lynne Olson's "Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England" yesterday. The review is up at Goodreads, and of course over at my book review blog "Coach's Reviews" as well. Presently reading "The Shoppe of Spells", a paranormal fiction fantasy romance by local (Coweta county, Ga.) author and friend Shanon Grey. I'm enjoying quite a bit. Shanon is pretty good at turning a deft phrase for a debut novelist. I'll pen a brief review hopefully by the end of the week, depending on how much time I can devote to my reading when I'm home in the evenings this upcoming week. As I say, I expect my school work dance card to be full, so I may have some days I get in pretty late.

Took the youngest (the animal whisperer) to her job at the local Waffle House eatery this morning. The sainted spouse has a much deserved day off, and the vegetarian moralist has promised to help out around the house today, if he can tear himself away from writing his dystopian nihilistic fiction and from playing Skyrim. We'll see...

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Well, I officially went back to work today. We had a meeting of all the school counselors to go over changes in registration, curriculum and other school related matters today. I started the morning kind of "bummed out" because budget cuts caused us to lose one of our counselors at my school, but I cheered up fairly quickly once I began to see my colleagues coming in to the meeting. I really like and respect most of the folks I work with both at my own building and county wide, so it was uplifting to see a lot of them for the first time since the end of last school year (only a few weeks back I know, but it still seems like it's been a while when we return from summer break, even as short as it is.) I couldn't get this song out of my head much of the day "Back to School Again"

Anyway, I'm looking forward to this upcoming year, even though it seems that as usual, there are a great number of changes, most of which will require major work on mine and my colleagues parts to be implemented before the students return on August 13, but more on that later.

Sunday, July 01, 2012

Interesting week, to say the least. The Supreme Court upholding the constitutionality of the Health Care law and the resultant whining of just about everybody on the right (all of whom had been sanctimoniously telling everybody how they just "knew" it was unconstitutional) lead to one of my happiest joyful days in a long long time. Seriously, my sense of "schadenfreude" (which I admit is one of my major sins) had me going around the house singing both "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning" and also the "Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy" song of the cartoon characters Ren and Stimpy. As I admit, much of the joy was totally in seeing such insufferable know-it-alls go through major episodes of weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth. My joy is tempered of course, because I know from a lifetime of observation and reading of history that the fight between those who view healthcare as a right (persons like myself) and those who view it as being only deserved by those who are wealthy enough to purchase it will go on. I firmly predict that the fight will indeed, go on long after I'm gone, but it still was nice to savor a brief victory this week.